The painters Maike Häusling and Katja von Puttkamer share an interest in urban space and post-war modernism. In Studio West, they now enter into dialogue with each other as well as with the architecture of the Kunsthalle Darmstadt. Maike Häusling shows a series of paintings with accumulations of bulky waste, which act like unintentional assemblages and stand in contrast to the regularity of the surrounding city architecture. As image carriers, the artist used boards from the bulky waste, which she arranges into new spatial structures in Studio West. Katja von Puttkamer is dedicated to stereotypical building details of the progress-optimistic post-war modernism and disturbs their aesthetics through painterly traces and voids. She contrasts facade blocks of West German department stores from the economic miracle years with the Centum department store facade of the former GDR in a window installation with flags.

Event as part of the exhibition:

March 17 at 4 p.m.: Artist talk with Maike Häusling and Katja von Puttkamer. The conversation will be moderated by Valerie Ucke, Museum Wiesbaden, who has been committed to the preservation and mediation of post-war architecture at the Mainz initiative DIE BETONISTEN since 2020.